The Buddha in the Attic

TRAITORS

The rumors began to reach us on the second day of the war.

THERE WAS TALK of a list. Some people being taken away in the middle of the night. A banker who went to work and never came home. A barber who disappeared during his lunch break. A few fishermen who had gone missing. Here and there, a boardinghouse, raided. A business, seized. A newspaper shut down. But this was all happening somewhere else. In distant valleys and faraway towns. In the big city, where all the women wore high heels and lipstick and danced until late in the night. “Nothing to do with us,” we said. We were simple women who lived quietly and kept to ourselves. Our own husbands would be safe.

FOR SEVERAL DAYS we stayed inside with our shades drawn and listened to the news of the war on the radio. We removed our names from our mailboxes. We brought in our shoes from the front porch. We did not send our children to school. At night we bolted our doors and spoke among ourselves in whispers. We closed our windows tight. Our husbands drank more than usual and stumbled early into bed. Our dogs fell asleep at our feet. No men came to our doors.

CAUTIOUSLY, we began to emerge from our homes. It was December and our older daughters had already left to work as maids in distant towns and the days were quiet and still. The darkness fell early. We rose every morning before dawn in the countryside and went out into the vineyards and pruned back the grapevines. We pulled up carrots from the cold, damp earth. We cut celery. We bunched broccoli. We dug deep furrows into the soil to catch the rain when it fell. Hawks drifted down through the rows of trees in the almond orchards and at dusk we could hear the coyotes calling out to one another in the hills. In J-town we gathered every evening in each other’s kitchens and exchanged the latest news. Perhaps there had been a raid in the next county over. A town surrounded after dark. A dozen houses searched. Telephone wires had been cut. Desks overturned. Documents confiscated. A few more men crossed off the list. “Grab your toothbrush,” they were told, and that was it, they were never heard from again.

SOME SAID that the men had been put on trains and sent far away, over the mountains, to the coldest part of the country. Some said they were enemy collaborators and would be deported within days. Some said they had been shot. Many of us dismissed the rumors as rumors but found ourselves spreading them—wildly, recklessly, and seemingly against our own will—nonetheless. Others of us refused to speak of the missing men by day but at night they came to us in our dreams. A few of us dreamed we were the missing men ourselves. One of us—Chizuko, who ran the kitchen at the Kearney Ranch and always liked to be prepared—packed a small suitcase for her husband and left it beside their front door. Inside was a toothbrush, a shaving kit, a bar of soap, a bar of chocolate—his favorite—and a clean change of clothes. These were the things she knew he would need to bring with him if his name came up next on the list. Always, though, there was the vague but nagging fear that she had left something out, some small but crucial item that, on some unknown date in some unknown court in the future, would serve as incontestable proof of her husband’s innocence. Only what, she asked herself, could that small item be? A Bible? A pair of reading glasses? A different kind of soap? Something more fragrant, perhaps? Something more manly? I hear they arrested a Shinto priest in the valley for owning a toy bamboo flute.

WHAT DID WE KNOW, exactly, about the list? The list had been drawn up hastily, on the morning of the attack. The list had been drawn up more than one year ago. The list had been in existence for almost ten years. The list was divided into three categories: “known dangerous” (Category A), “potentially dangerous” (Category B), and “pro-Axis inclinations” (Category C). It was nearly impossible to get your name on the list. It was extremely easy to get your name on the list. Only people who belonged to our race were on the list. There were Germans and Italians on the list, but their names appeared toward the bottom. The list was written in indelible red ink. The list was typewritten on index cards. The list did not exist. The list existed, but only in the mind of the director of military intelligence, who was known for his perfect recall. The list was a figment of our imaginations. The list contained over five hundred names. The list contained over five thousand names. The list was endless. Every time an arrest was made another name was crossed off the list. Every time a name was crossed off the list a new name was added to it. New names were added to the list daily. Weekly. Hourly.

A FEW OF US began receiving anonymous letters in the mail, informing us that our own husbands would be next. I’d think about getting out of town if I were you. Others reported that their husbands had been threatened by angry Filipino workers in the fields. They came at him with their vegetable knives. Hitomi, who had worked as a housekeeper at the Prince estate for more than ten years, was held up at gunpoint in broad daylight as she was heading back into town. Mitsuko went out one evening before supper to gather the eggs from her chickens and saw her laundry on fire on the line. And we knew this was only the beginning.

OVERNIGHT, our neighbors began to look at us differently. Maybe it was the little girl down the road who no longer waved to us from her farmhouse window. Or the longtime customers who suddenly disappeared from our restaurants and stores. Or our mistress, Mrs. Trimble, who pulled us aside one morning as we were mopping her kitchen and whispered into our ear, “Did you know that the war was coming?” Club ladies began boycotting our fruit stands because they were afraid our produce might be tainted with arsenic. Insurance companies canceled our insurance. Banks froze our bank accounts. Milkmen stopped delivering milk to our doors. “Company orders,” one tearful milkman explained. Children took one look at us and ran away like frightened deer. Little old ladies clutched their purses and froze up on the sidewalk at the sight of our husbands and shouted out, “They’re here!” And even though our husbands had warned us—They’re afraid—still, we were unprepared. Suddenly, to find ourselves the enemy.

IT WAS ALL, of course, because of the stories in the papers. They said that thousands of our men had sprung into action, with clockwork precision, the moment the attack on the island had begun. They said we had flooded the roads with our run-down trucks and jalopies. They said we had signaled to the enemy planes with flares from our fields. They said that the week before the attack several of our children had bragged to their classmates that “something big” was about to happen. They said that those same children, when questioned further by their teachers, had reported that their parents had celebrated the news of the attack for days. They were shouting banzais. They said that in the event of a second attack here on the mainland anyone whose name appeared on the list would more than likely rise up to assist the enemy. They said that our truck farmers were foot soldiers in a vast underground army. They’ve got thousands of weapons down below in their vegetable cellars. They said that our houseboys were intelligence agents in disguise. They said that our gardeners were all hiding shortwave radio transmitters in their garden hoses and when the Pacific zero hour struck we’d get busy at once. Burst dams. Burning oil fields. Bombed bridges. Blasted roads. Blocked tunnels. Poisoned reservoirs. And what was to stop one of us from walking into a crowded marketplace with a stick of dynamite tied to our waist? Nothing.

EVERY EVENING, at dusk, we began burning our things: old bank statements and diaries, Buddhist family altars, wooden chopsticks, paper lanterns, photographs of our unsmiling relatives back home in the village in their strange country clothes. I watched my brother’s face turn to ash and float up into the sky. We set fire to our white silk wedding kimonos out of doors, in our apple orchards, in the furrows between the trees. We poured gasoline over our ceremonial dolls in metal trash cans in J-town back alleys. We got rid of anything that might suggest our husbands had enemy ties. Letters from our sisters. East Neighbor’s son has run away with the umbrella maker’s wife. Letters from our fathers. The trains have been electrified and now whenever you go through a tunnel you do not get soot all over your face! Letters from our mothers written to us on the day we’d left home. I can still see your footprints in the mud down by the river. And we wondered why we had insisted for so long on clinging to our strange, foreign ways. We’ve made them hate us.

THE NIGHTS GREW LONGER, and colder, and every day we learned of a few more men who had been taken away. A produce distributor in the southland. A judo instructor. A silk importer. A shipping clerk in the city who was returning to his office from a late lunch. Apprehended at the crosswalk while waiting for the light to turn green. An onion grower in the Delta who was suspected of plotting to blow up the levee. They found a box of stumping powder in his barn. A travel agent. A language instructor. A lettuce farmer on the coast who was accused of using his flashlight to send signals to enemy ships out at sea.

CHIYOMI’S HUSBAND began going to sleep with his clothes on, just in case tonight was the night. Because the most shameful thing, he had told her, would be to be taken away in his pajamas (Eiko’s husband had been taken away in his pajamas). Asako’s husband had become obsessed with his shoes. He polishes them every night to a high shine and lines them up at the foot of the bed. Yuriko’s husband, a traveling fertilizer salesman who had been less than faithful to her over the years, could only fall asleep now if she was right there by his side. “It’s a little late,” she said, “but what can you do? Once you marry, it’s for life.” Hatsumi’s husband whispered a quick prayer to the Buddha every night before climbing into bed. Some nights he even prayed to Jesus, because what if he was the one true god? Masumi’s husband suffered from nightmares. It was dark and all the streets had disappeared. The sea was rising. The sky was falling. He was trapped on an island. He was lost in a desert. He had misplaced his wallet and was late to catch a train. He saw his wife standing in a crowd and called out to her but she did not turn around. All that man has ever given me is grief.

THE FIRST HEAVY RAINS blew down the last of the leaves from the trees and the days quickly lost their warmth. The shadows slowly lengthened. Our younger children went to school every morning and came home with stories. A girl had swallowed a penny at recess and almost died. Mr. Barnett was trying to grow a mustache again. Mrs. Trachtenberg was in a bad mood. She’s having her monthly. We spent long days in the orchards with our older sons and husbands, clipping twigs, pruning branches, lopping off the dead limbs that would not bear fruit in the summer or fall. We cooked and cleaned in the suburbs for the families we had been cooking and cleaning for for years. We did the things we had always done, but nothing felt the same. “Every little noise frightens me now,” said Onatsu. “A knock on the door. The ringing of a telephone. The barking of a dog. I am constantly listening for footsteps.” And whenever a strange car drove through the neighborhood her heart began to pound, for she was sure that her husband’s time had come. Sometimes, in her more confused moments, she imagined that it had already happened, and her husband was now gone, and she had to admit, she was almost relieved, for it was the waiting that was most difficult.

FOR THREE DAYS a cold wind blew down from the mountains without stopping. Clouds of dust rose up from the fields and the bare branches of the trees thrashed against an empty gray sky. Gravestones toppled over in our cemeteries. Barn doors flew open. Tin roofs rattled. Favorite dogs ran away. A Chinese laundryman was found unconscious and bleeding on the waterfront and left behind for dead. They mistook him for one of us. A barn was set on fire in a remote inland valley and the stench of dead cattle lingered downwind for days.

AT NIGHT we sat in our kitchens with our husbands as they pored over the day’s papers, scrutinizing every line, every word, for clues to our fate. We discussed the latest rumors. I hear they’re putting us into work camps to grow food for the troops. We turned on the radio and listened to the bulletins from the front. The news, of course, was not good. The enemy had sunk six more of our unsinkable battleships. The enemy’s planes had been sighted making test runs in our skies. The enemy’s submarines were coming closer and closer to our shores. The enemy was planning a combined attack on the coast from without and within and all alert, keen-eyed citizens were being asked to inform the authorities of any fifth columnists who might dwell in our midst. Because anyone, we were reminded, could be a spy. Your butler, your gardener, your florist, your maid.

AT THREE in the morning one of our most prominent berry growers was dragged out of bed and escorted out his front door. He was the first of the men we knew to be taken away. They’re only going after the wealthy farmers, people said. The following evening a local field hand at the Spiegl Ranch was picked up in his muddy overalls while walking his dog by the reservoir and questioned for three days and three nights in a brightly lit room with no windows before being told he could go home. But when his wife drove down to the station to get him he had no idea who she was. He thought I was an impostor who was trying to get him to talk. The next day three women we knew in a nearby town came forward to report that their husbands, too, had been on the list. “They put him in a car,” one of them said, “and he was gone.” Two days later, one of our competitors—the only other rancher in the valley whose raisin grapes were even half as sweet as ours—was handcuffed to a chair in his kitchen for four hours while three men searched his house and then he was allowed to go free. His wife, people said, had served the men coffee and pie. And we all wanted to know: What kind of pie? Strawberry? Rhubarb? Lemon meringue? And how did the men take their coffee? With sugar or without?

SOME NIGHTS our husbands lay awake for hours going over their pasts again and again, searching for proof that their names, too, might be on the list. Surely there must be something they had said, or done, surely there must be some mistake they had made, surely they must be guilty of something, some obscure crime, perhaps, of which they were not even aware. Only what, they asked us, could that obscure crime be? Was it that toast they had given to our homeland at last year’s annual summer picnic? Or some remark they may have made about the President’s most recent speech? He called us gangsters. Or had they made a contribution to the wrong charity—a charity whose secret ties to the enemy they knew nothing about? Could that be it? Or had somebody—somebody, no doubt, with a grudge—filed a false accusation against them with the authorities? One of our customers at the Capitol Laundry, perhaps, to whom we had once been unnecessarily curt? (Was it, then, all our fault?) Or a disgruntled neighbor whose flower bed our dog had made use of one too many times? Should they have been friendlier, our husbands asked us. Were their fields too unkempt? Had they kept too much to themselves? Or was their guilt written plainly, and for all the world to see, across their face? Was it their face, in fact, for which they were guilty? Did it fail to please in some way? Worse yet, did it offend?

IN JANUARY we were ordered to register with the authorities and turn over all items of contraband to our local police: guns, bombs, dynamite, cameras, binoculars, knives with blades longer than six inches, signaling devices such as flashlights and flares, anything that might be used to assist the enemy in the event of an attack. Then came the travel restrictions—no people of our ancestry allowed to travel more than five miles from their homes—and the 8:00 p.m. curfew, and even though most of us were not really night people, for the first time in our lives we found ourselves longing to take the occasional midnight stroll. Just once, with my husband, through the almond groves, to know what it’s like. But at two in the morning when we looked out our windows and saw our friends and neighbors raiding our barns we did not dare set foot out our front doors, for fear that we, too, would be turned in to the police. Because all it took, we knew, was one phone call to get your name on the list. And when our older sons began staying out all night downtown on Saturdays we did not ask them where they had been when they came home late the next morning, or who they had been with, or how much she had cost, or why they were wearing I Am Chinese buttons pinned to the collars of their shirts. “Let them have their fun while they can,” our husbands said to us. So we wished our sons a civil good morning in the kitchen—Eggs or coffee?—and got on with our day.

“WHEN I’M GONE,” our husbands said to us. We said to them, “If.” They said, “Remember to tip the iceman,” and “Always greet the customers by name when they come through the door.” They told us where to find the children’s birth certificates, and when to ask Pete at the garage to rotate the wheels on the truck. “If you run out of money,” they said to us, “sell the tractor.” “Sell the greenhouse.” “Sell off all the merchandise in the store.” They reminded us to watch our posture—Shoulders back—and not let the children slip up on their chores. They said, “Stay in touch with Mr. Hauer at the Berry Growers’ Association. He is a useful person to know and may be able to help you.” They said, “Believe nothing you hear about me.” And, “Trust no one.” And, “Don’t tell the neighbors a thing.” They said, “Don’t worry about the mice in the ceiling. I’ll take care of them when I come home.” They reminded us to carry our alien identification cards with us whenever we left the house and avoid all public discussion of the war. If asked, however, to give our opinion, we were to denounce the attack loudly, in a no-nonsense tone of voice. “Do not apologize,” they said to us. “Speak only English.” “Suppress the urge to bow.”

IN THE NEWSPAPERS, and on the radio, we began to hear talk of mass removals. House to Hold Hearings on National Defense Migration. Governor Urges President to Evacuate All Enemy Aliens from the Coast. Send Them Back to Tojo! It would happen gradually, we heard, over a period of weeks, if not months. None of us would be forced out overnight. We would be sent far away, to a point of our own choosing deep in the zone of the interior where we could not do anyone any harm. We would be held under protective custody arrest for the duration of the war. Only those of us who lived within one hundred miles of the coast would be removed. Only those of us on the list would be removed. Only those of us who were non-citizens would be removed. Our adult children would be allowed to remain behind to oversee our businesses and farms. Our businesses and farms would be confiscated and put up for auction. So start liquidating now. We would be separated from our younger children. We would be sterilized and deported at the earliest practicable date.

WE TRIED to think positive thoughts. If we finished ironing the laundry before midnight our husband’s name would be removed from the list. If we bought a ten-dollar war bond our children would be spared. If we sang “The Hemp-Winding Song” all the way through without making a mistake then there would be no list, no laundry, no war bonds, no war. Often, though, at the end of the day, we felt uneasy, as if there was something we had forgotten to do. Had we remembered to close the sluice gate? Turn off the stove? Feed the chickens? Feed the children? Tap the bedpost three times?

IN FEBRUARY the days grew slowly warmer and the first poppies bloomed bright orange in the hills. Our numbers continued to dwindle. Mineko’s husband was gone. Takeko’s husband was gone. Mitsue’s husband was gone. They found a bullet in the dirt behind his woodshed. Omiyo’s husband was pulled over on the highway for being out on the road five minutes after curfew. Hanayo’s husband was arrested at his own dinner table for reasons unknown. “The worst thing he ever did was get a parking ticket,” she said. And Shimako’s husband, a truck driver for the Union Fruit Company whom none of us had ever heard utter a word, was apprehended in the dairy aisle of the local grocery for being a spy for the enemy high command. “I knew it all along,” someone said. Someone else said, “Next time it could be you.”

THE HARDEST THING, Chizuko told us, was not knowing where he was. The first night after her husband’s arrest she had woken up in a panic, unable to remember why she was alone. She had reached out and felt the empty bed beside her and thought, I’m dreaming, this is a nightmare, but it wasn’t, it was real. But she had gotten out of bed anyway and wandered through the house calling out for her husband as she peered into closets and checked under beds. Just in case. And when she saw his suitcase still standing there beside the front door she took out the bar of chocolate and slowly began to eat. “He forgot,” she said. Yumiko had seen her husband twice in her dreams and he’d told her he was doing all right. It was the dog, she said, that she was most worried about. “She lies around for hours on top of his slippers and growls at me whenever I try to sit on his chair.” Fusako confessed that whenever she heard that someone else’s husband had been taken away she felt secretly relieved. “You know, ‘Better her than me.’ ” And then, of course, she felt so ashamed. Kanuko admitted that she did not miss her husband at all. “He worked me like a man and kept me pregnant for years.” Kyoko said that as far as she knew her husband’s name was not on the list. “He’s a nurseryman. He loves flowers. There is nothing subversive about him.” Nobuko said, “Yes, but you never know.” The rest of us held our breath and waited to see what would happen next.

WE FELT CLOSER to our husbands, now, than we ever had before. We gave them the best cuts of meat at supper. We pretended not to notice when they made crumbs. We wiped away their muddy footprints from the floor without comment. At night we did not turn away from them in bed. And if they yelled at us for failing to prepare the bath the way they liked it, or grew impatient and said unkind things—Twenty years in America and all you can say is “Harro”?—we held our tongues and tried not to get angry, because what if we woke up the next morning and they were not there? How would we feed the children? How would we pay the rent? Satoko had to sell off all her furniture. Who would put out the smudge pots in the middle of the night to protect the fruit trees from an unexpected spring frost? Who would fix the broken tractor hitch? Who would mix the fertilizer? Who would sharpen the plow? Who would calm us down when someone had been rude to us in the market, or called us a less-than-flattering name on the street? Who would grab our arms and shake us when we stomped our feet and told them we’d had it, we were leaving them, we were taking the next boat back home? The only reason you married me was to get extra help on the farm.

MORE AND MORE now we began to suspect that there were informers among us. Teruko’s husband, people whispered, had turned in a labor foreman at the apple-drying plant with whom she had once had an affair. Fumino’s husband had been accused of being pro-Axis by a former business partner who was now desperate for cash. (Informers, we had heard, were paid twenty-five dollars a head.) Kuniko’s husband had been denounced as a member of the Black Dragon Society by none other than Kuniko herself. He was about to leave her for his mistress. And Ruriko’s husband? Korean, his neighbors said. Working undercover. Bankrolled by the government to keep an eye on members of the local Buddhist church. I saw him taking down license plate numbers in the parking lot. Several days later he was found badly beaten in a ditch by the side of the road and the next morning he and his family were nowhere to be found. The front door to their house was wide open, their cats had been recently fed, a pot of hot water was still boiling on the stove. And that was that, they were gone. Word of their whereabouts, however, began to reach us within days. They’re down south by the border. They’ve fled to the next state. They’re living in a nice house in the city with a brand-new car and no visible means of support.

SPRING ARRIVED. The almond trees in the orchards began dropping the last of their petals and the cherry trees were just reaching full bloom. Sun poured down through the branches of the orange trees. Sparrows rustled in the grass. A few more of our men disappeared every day. We tried to keep ourselves busy and be grateful for little things. A friendly nod from a neighbor. A hot bowl of rice. A bill paid on time. A child safely put to bed. We woke up early every morning and pulled on our field clothes and we plowed and we planted and we hoed. We dug up weeds in our vineyards. We irrigated our squash and peas. Once a week, on Fridays, we put up our hair and went into town to go shopping, but did not stop to say hello to one another when we met on the street. They’ll think we’re exchanging secrets. We rarely visited each other after dark in J-town because of the curfew. We did not linger long after services at church. Now whenever I speak to someone, I have to ask myself, “Is this someone who will betray me?” Around our younger children, too, we were careful about what we said. Chieko’s husband was turned in as a spy by his eight-year-old son. Some of us even began to wonder about our own husbands: Does he have a secret identity of which I am not aware?

SOON WE WERE hearing stories of entire communities being taken away. More than ninety percent of our men had been removed from a small town of lettuce growers in a valley to our north. More than one hundred of our men had been removed from the defense zone around the airfield. And down south, in a small fishing town of black shanties on the coast, all people of our descent had been rounded up in a day and a night on a blanket warrant without warning. Their logbooks had been confiscated, their sardine boats placed under guard, their fishing nets cut to shreds and tossed back out into the sea. Because the fishermen, it was said, were not really fishermen, but secret officers of the enemy’s imperial navy. They found their uniforms wrapped up in oil paper at the bottom of their bait boxes.

SOME OF US went out and began buying sleeping bags and suitcases for our children, just in case we were next. Others of us went about our work as usual and tried to remain calm. A little more starch on this collar and it’ll be fine, now, don’t you think? Whatever would happen would happen, we told ourselves, it was no use tempting the gods. One of us stopped talking. Another of us went out early one morning to water the horses and hung herself in the barn. Fubuki was so anxious that when the evacuation orders were finally posted she let out a sigh of relief, for at last, the waiting had come to an end. Teiko stared at the notice in disbelief and quietly shook her head. “But what about our strawberries?” she asked. “They’ll be ready to pick in three weeks.” Machiko said she wasn’t going, it was as simple as that. “We just renewed our lease for the restaurant.” Umeko said we had no choice but to do as we were told. “It’s the President’s order,” she said. And who were we to question the President? “What will the soil be like there?” Takiko’s husband wanted to know. How many days of sun would we get? And how many days of rain? Kiko just folded her hands and looked down at her feet. “It’s all over,” she said softly. At least, Haruyo said, we would all be leaving together. Hisako said, “Yes, but what have we done?” Isino covered her face and wept. “I should have divorced my husband years ago and taken the children back home to my mother in Japan.”

FIRST they told us we were being sent to the mountains, so be sure to dress warmly, it would be very very cold. So we went out and bought long woolen underwear and our first warm winter coats. Then we heard we were being sent to the desert, where there were poisonous black snakes and mosquitoes the size of small birds. There were no doctors there, people said, and the place was crawling with thieves. So we went out and bought padlocks and bottles of vitamins for our children, boxes of bandages, sticks of moxa, medicinal plasters, castor oil, iodine, aspirin, gauze. We heard that we could only bring with us one bag apiece so we sewed little cloth knapsacks for our youngest children, with their names embroidered on each. Inside we put pencils and ledgers, toothbrushes, sweaters, brown paper bags filled with rice we had left out to dry on tin trays in the sun. In case we get separated. “This is only for a while,” we said to them. We told them not to worry. We talked about all the things we would do when we came home. We would eat dinner every night in front of the radio. We would take them to the picture show downtown. We would go to the traveling circus to see the Siamese twins and the lady with the world’s smallest head. No bigger than a plum!

PALE GREEN BUDS broke on the grapevines in the vineyards and all throughout the valleys the peach trees were flowering beneath clear blue skies. Drifts of wild mustard blossomed bright yellow in the canyons. Larks flew down from the hills. And one by one, in distant cities and towns, our older sons and daughters quit their jobs and dropped out of school and began coming home. They helped us find people to take over our dry cleaners in J-town. They helped us find new tenants for our restaurants. They helped us put up signs in our stores. Buy Now! Save! Entire Stock Must Be Sold! They pulled on their overalls in the countryside and helped us prepare for the harvest one last time, for we had been ordered to till our fields until the very end. This was our contribution to the war effort, we were told. An opportunity for us to prove our loyalty. A way to provide fresh fruits and vegetables for the folks on the home front.

JUNKMEN SLOWLY DROVE their trucks down the narrow streets of our neighborhoods, offering us money for our things. Ten dollars for a new stove we had bought for two hundred the year before. Five dollars for a refrigerator. A nickel for a lamp. Neighbors with whom we had never exchanged a word approached us in the fields and asked us if there was anything we wanted to get rid of. That cultivator, perhaps? That harrow? That plow horse? That plow? That Queen Anne rosebush in our front yard they’d been admiring for years? Strangers knocked on our doors. “Got any dogs?” one man asked. His son, he explained, badly wanted a new puppy. Another man said he lived alone in a trailer near the shipping yard and would be happy to take a used cat. “It gets lonely, you know.” Sometimes we sold hastily, and for whatever we could get, and other times we gave away favorite vases and teapots and tried not to care too much, because our mothers had always told us: One must not get too attached to the things of this world.

AS THE DAY of our departure drew nearer we paid our final bills to our creditors and thanked the loyal customers who had stood by us until the very end. Sheriff Burckhardt’s wife, Henrietta, who bought five baskets of strawberries every Friday at our fruit stand and left us a fifty-cent tip. Please buy yourself something nice. Retired widower Thomas Duffy, who came to our noodle shop every day at half past noon and ordered a plate of chicken fried rice. Ladies’ Auxiliary Club president Rosalind Anders, who refused to take her dry cleaning anyplace else. The Chinese just don’t do it right. We continued to work our fields as we always had, but nothing felt quite real. We nailed together crates to box up crops we would not be able to harvest. We pinched the shoots off of grapevines that would not ripen until after we had left. We turned over the soil and planted tomato seedlings that would come up in late summer, when we were already gone. The days were long and sunny now. The nights were cool. The reservoirs full. The price of sugar snaps was rising. Asparagus was nearing an all-time high. There were green berries on the strawberry plants and in the orchards the nectarine trees would soon be heavy with fruit. One more week and we would have made a fortune. And even though we knew we would soon be leaving we kept on hoping that something would happen, and we would not have to go.

PERHAPS THE CHURCH would intervene on our behalf, or the President’s wife. Or maybe there had been a terrible misunderstanding and it was really some other people they had meant to take. “The Germans,” someone suggested. “Or the Italians,” said someone else. Someone else said, “How about the Chinese?” Others of us remained quiet and prepared to leave as best we could. We sent notes to our children’s teachers, apologizing to them in our broken English for our children’s sudden and unexpected absence from school. We wrote out instructions for future tenants, explaining to them how to work the sticky flue in the fireplace and what to do about the leak in the roof. Just use a bucket. We left lotus blossoms for the Buddha outside our temples. We made last visits to our cemeteries and poured water over the gravestones of those of us whose spirits had already passed out of this world. Yoshiye’s young son, Tetsuo, who had been gored by an angry bull. The tea merchant’s daughter from Yokohama, whose name we could now barely recall. Died of the Spanish influenza on her fifth day off the boat. We walked the rows of our vineyards one last time with our husbands, who could not resist pulling up one last weed. We propped up sagging branches in our almond orchards. We checked for worms in our lettuce fields and scooped up handfuls of freshly turned black earth. We did last loads of wash in our laundries. We shuttered our groceries. We swept our floors. We packed our bags. We gathered up our children and from every town in every valley and every city up and down the coast, we left.

THE LEAVES of the trees continued to turn in the wind. The rivers continued to flow. Insects hummed in the grass as always. Crows cawed. The sky did not fall. No President changed his mind. Mitsuko’s favorite black hen clucked once and laid a warm brown egg. A green plum fell early from a tree. Our dogs ran after us with balls in their mouths, eager for one last toss, and for once, we had to turn them away. Go home. Neighbors peered out at us through their windows. Cars honked. Strangers stared. A boy on a bicycle waved. A startled cat dove under a bed in one of our houses as looters began to break down the front door. Curtains ripped. Glass shattered. Wedding dishes smashed to the floor. And we knew it would only be a matter of time until all traces of us were gone.